[lazyasciiart]

Then you need to give all the poor people enough money to outbid all the rich people - otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction. Sounds a lot more expensive than letting people self select and assigning tickets based on some method other than money.

[eru]

> [...] otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction

I don't see how that works. We don't see only rich people win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either. Nor do they eat all the meat.

[lazyasciiart]

These tickets are orders of magnitude rarer than houses or even concert tickets. There are ~20,000 tickets to the Wave, total, each year - in 2017 alone there were over 1 million tickets to Justin Bieber concerts. There are over 700 billionaires in the US, and over 5 million millionaires. If only one third of millionaires wants to do these hikes, only once ever, and doesn't want to take anyone else, that's the next 100 years of tickets bought up.